Murdina Ritchie put everything on the line to earn one chance to prove herself at the Oymyakon Foreign Service Academy. Just one chance. Despite the bad reputation that comes with her family name, despite the bullies desperate to see her fail, she refuses to back down from any opportunity to show her worth.Everyone at the academy knows her skill, knows her inability to compromise in the pursuit of excellence, and knows her drive for success at...
For Murdina Ritchie, acceptance at the Oymyakon Foreign Service Academy means one last chance at her dream of becoming a diplomat for the Union of Free Worlds. For Shackleton Fitz IV, it represents his last chance not to fail out of military service entirely.Strange that fate should throw them together now, among the last group of students admitted after the start of the semester. They had once shared the strongest of friendships. But that all...
Galactic Central, a collection of floating cities in a vast, manmade, planetless cloud. Scout Shannon longed to see it since she first heard of it. This place long represented her shining future. But in her less shiny present, she reaches it by smuggling herself aboard a cargo ship and hides in the lower sewer-like levels of the most opulent of the floating cities. Teams of girl assassins still hunt her. Worse, her friends are in danger and do...
Having escaped yet another closing trap, Scout Shannon finds herself on a snowbound mountaintop far from civilization. With assassins eager to kill her, laying low on an alien world is the smartest play.But wherever Scout goes, trouble follows. And a hamlet in the mountains gets far more remote when girl assassins destroy the only means back to civilization.Now Scout and her dogs face a long, cold climb back to the frozen star port city, her o...
Stranded on the far side of the moon with her friends, Scout Shannon waits for rescue from galactic central. Hunted by two sets of enemies, surrounded by an impenetrable barrier maintained by an almost alien class of humans, time runs short.Caught between two factions of a powerful trade dynasty, Scout fights to remain free and to protect her friends. But the people trying to make her their pawn barely seem human to her eyes. Fight them? She c...
Scout Shannon wants nothing more than to leave her home world and its petty squabbling factions behind. Galactic central with all of its excitement and opportunities awaits her. She makes it as far as her own planet's orbit before the snares of bureaucracy close around her, trapping her on a space station populated by her people's oldest foe. Then her rescuer, her only friend in the galaxy, disappears, abducted by a group of strangers the mome...
After spending the last four days of her life hiding out from a deadly solar particle storm in an underground bunker, trapped with six treacherous women and a trio of girl assassins, Scout Shannon just wants to find the man who conned her mentor and leave her home world for good.Alas, the long-threatened war draws nearer and Scout finds herself caught in the middle, surrounded by rebels and bandits. Worse, she carries a pocketful of dangerous ...
Scout Shannon's whole family died the day the Space Farers dropped an asteroid on their domed city. Now she lives alone, out in the wild with only her dogs for company. She prefers it that way.But Scout finds herself at a crossroads. One road leads back to a quiet life snug under the protective dome of a city. The other road leads to a life in the rebellion, a life of adventure and excitement but also danger. Dare she try to find the rebels hi...
After humankind fled Earth for space they discovered one inescapable truth. People die in space. And lots of dead people means lots of ghosts. April Nguyen earns a nice living getting rid of those ghosts. People all over the Solar System clamor for her aid. April's only problem? Never actually seeing a ghost. She pretends, she feigns, she completely convinces her clients, but she fears her inevitable exposure as a fraud. And then comes Hakim, ...
Valentina knows how to live in the community spread throughout the old mining caves under the Martian ice cap. A violent place in a forbidding climate, but home for her and her brother.Until she wakes from a coma to find her brother gone. Her father thinks her incapable of following them back to the equatorial cities.He underestimates her - her stubbornness, her courage and her inventiveness. But she underestimates the cold, airless surface of...
When a deadly plague ravaged the Earth refugees fled into space, crowding into any space station or lunar colony that would take them. Decades passed and the descendants of the survivors struggle to live in anything remotely spaceworthy.Omesh, banished from his Earthly home, finds himself in Barnacle Town. A collection of salvage clinging to the hull of a space station in lunar orbit. Thousands of lives cling precariously to the hull, at the w...
Tales of Old Gods and New" collects ten stories from fantasy and science fiction writer Kate MacLeod: the high fantasy murder mystery "Impostor Apparition", the western weird tale "Unsafe, Unsound", the pseudo-Egyptian fantasy "Tear of a Sphinx", the early Bronze Age fantasy "Changing Tides", "In the Waste Places", the sequel to "Oil Fire", the science fiction story "Taren and Keui", tale of two alien beings finding a way out of a zero sum gam...
